Review/Rock; David Bowie's Oldies Get a Final Go-Round

By JON PARELES

Published: April 29, 1990

MIAMI, April 27—
Leave it to David Bowie to find a way out of the longtime rocker's oldies problem. For a performer who got started in the 1960's, like Mr. Bowie, playing old hits in concert can become a dreary obligation. With his current tour, which had its first United States performance tonight at the Miami Arena, Mr. Bowie decided to fulfill that obligation, and then jettison it.

The tour, which is to reach the New York area in the summer, is a career-length retrospective. Its songs were chosen, in part, through telephone requests by fans, and the only new material in a two-hour show is ''Pretty Pink Rose,'' which Mr. Bowie wrote for the current album by the tour's music director and lead guitarist, Adrian Belew.

Unlike such contemporaries as the Who and the Rolling Stones, Mr. Bowie has never been inactive long enough to make the tour any kind of comeback. It coincides, conveniently enough, with the reissue of Mr. Bowie's catalogue on compact disks by Rykodisc, under Mr. Bowie's supervision. And once the tour is over, Mr. Bowie has said, he will no longer perform the old songs in concert. It's the oldies' last hurrah.

After years of reinventing rock theater with every tour, Mr. Bowie overreached with the overblown Glass Spider stadium extravanganza in 1987. So he scaled down; his next project was to assemble a band, Tin Machine, which played only a few club dates with minimal staging.

The new tour is somewhere in between. Mr. Bowie doesn't try to replicate past images and personas. As with Tin Machine, Mr. Bowie and the band dress in dark suits and white shirts. But special effects are back -notably the use of giant film and video projections, in stark black and white, on a transparent scrim. Often, Mr. Bowie sings and plays while dwarfed by his own image, which usually gazes dispassionately from the screen; in one song, a four-story-high woman (the dancer Louise Lecavalier) chases him offstage. The pre-filmed Bowie sometimes lip-synchs with the live one, a matter of unwavering timing and electronic wizardry.

In a way, Mr. Bowie might be rebutting the current style of arena theatrics, in which performers like Janet Jackson or Milli Vanilli concentrate on matching the dance routines from their video clips, while singing weakly or even lip-synching. Mr. Bowie belted his songs in full voice, swiveled his hips now and then and came up with some neatly cryptic gestures in songs like ''Fashion.'' But for the bulk of his show his show, the musicians played music while the video screens took care of the dancing - except in ''Suffragette City,'' where Ms. Lecavalier and a fellow member of the Canadian troupe La La Human Steps did some gymnastic twirls and leaps on stage.

Mr. Bowie and Mr. Belew have worked to make the songs familiar but not routine. The backup band has only four members - Mr. Belew, Rick Fox on keyboards, Michael Hodges on drums and Erdal Kizilcay on bass. As the keyboards fill in textures, Mr. Belew's guitar takes over for virtually all solos, often turning them into squealing, siren-like excursions that shake free of the original versions. And along with the obligatory material, from ''Space Oddity'' to ''Changes'' to ''Fame'' to ''Let's Dance,'' Mr. Bowie slipped in some unexpected songs like ''Be My Wife,'' ''Queen Bitch'' and ''Life on Mars.'' Even with Mr. Bowie's determined variations, the show remains a retrospective, a reprise of hits. Some songs seemed hurried, as if Mr. Bowie was glad to get them over with, but others, especially from his mid-1970's collaborations with Brian Eno, still seemed to fascinate him. The retrospective reminds fans of Mr. Bowie's strengths - his ear for a good riff, a voice that can be ardent and disinterested almost simultaneously, his continual questioning of sexual roles and his way of slipping bizarre verses behind catchy, basic choruses. Much as he may want to be done with them, Mr. Bowie will likely be fielding requests for these songs for the rest of his career.

Photo: David Bowie during his concert Friday night at the Miami Arena. (The New York Times/Eliot J. Schecter)